we’re new to fmod (3 and Ex) but are currently looking at it to see if either would be usable for us.

One thing that is quite crucial is 3D sound on multiple speakers on linux. However I’m having trouble getting the multispeaker example to work.

I have verified that my alsa installation is indeed capable of this (with openal on alsa for instance I can get sound from more than two speakers). Regrettably the fmod ex multispeaker example doesnt put out anything else aside from the stereo channels.

I also modified the example a bit to make it select alsa instead of autodetect, and also 4.1 and 5.1 speaker configurations but none of this helps.

So obviously the question is, why doesnt it work, what could be the problem?

The bigger question is, should it work? In other words, is 3D and more than two speaker setups in any way supported by fmod (ex)?

Just to clarify though, openal does indeed work through alsa when doing multichannel. And although we only did limited testing yet, we are hearing more than two separate channels. So alsa seems to be able, at least with this hardware setup, of offering more than two usable channels.

But if fmod doesnt use them, we’re obviously still stuck.

As a side issue, if I’m correct fmod ex supports using multiple soundcards? Can such a setup be used for 3d audio? eg card 1 doing front, card 2 doing rear?

just to confirm, we did some extra testing, also on non SBLive hardware and on both alsa is able to play the separate channels of a multichannel wav file (with aplay -Dsurround51 eg)

So it’s indeed alsa providing the multichannel output, not some joined/hidden effort between OpenAL and the SBLive.

Please note also that both (agreed, still not a huge number) of these systems did this out of the box. No additional tweaking has been done. So either we’re just incredibly lucky, or multichannel support may have improved 😉